On the ThinkPHP blog today, Andreas Uhsemann has posted about a project that he and fellow Mayflower Barcampers came up with that they thought could be useful (and interesting) to work on - a PHP extension to interface with the Skype communication tool.

At the Mayflower Barcamp a few weeks ago we had a very interesting and promising project: Develop a PHP extension for communication with Skype. Actually this project was a merge between two projects: One was to "develop a PHP extension" - five out of six project members never had written any PHP extension or did any PHP core development before. The other project was the Skype extension, with the goal to have a new PHP function that could send a chat message to a given Skype profile.

As they worked on it, they realized that it was really D-Bus (the message bus system) they needed to interface with, not Skype directly. They include some of the code they used to make the connection - creating the message, setting a few parameters and "send and block" the message out to the D-Bus connection waiting. They've even put the code up on a public CVS repository (on thinkforge.org) if you'd like to download and play with it yourself.

For all of you out there that didn't get a chance to listen in on the live PHP Women podcast that the Zend Developer Zone put on, you can grab this latest podcast from the site and get in on all the good stuff.

Regular listeners are probably getting tired of hearing me say this, but today we are going to do something a little different. Back in October of 2007, PHPWomen passed their first birthday. It's taken me a while to get everything together but finally, I got a chance to sit down with four of the charter members, Ligaya Turmelle, Elizabeth Naramore, Elizabeth Smith and Sara Golemon and talk about the first year of phpwomen.